LOVE-BIRD, a name somewhat indefinitely bestowed, chiefly by dealers in live animals and their customers, on some of the smaller short-tailed Parrots, from the remarkable affection which examples of opposite sexes exhibit towards each other, an affection popularly believed to be so great that of a pair that have been kept together in captivity neither can long survive the loss of its partner. By many systematic ornithologists the little birds thus named, brought almost entirely from Africa and South America, have been retained in a single genus, Psittacula, though those belonging to the former country were by others separated as Agapornis. This separation, however, was by no means generally approved, and indeed it was not easily justified, until Garrod (Froc. Zool. Society, 1874, p. 593) assigned good anatomical ground, afforded by the structure of the carotid artery, for regarding the two groups as distinct, and thus removed what had seemed to be the almost unintelligible puzzle presented by the geographical distribution of the species of Ρsittacula in a large sense, though Professor Huxley (οp. cit., 1868, p. 319) had indeed already suggested one way of meeting the difficulty. As the genus is now restricted, only one of the six species of Psittacula enumerated in the Nomenclator Avium of Messrs Sclater and Salvin is known to be found outside of the Neotropical Region, the exceptional instance being the Mexican Ρ. cyanopygia, and not one of the seven recognized by the same authors as forming the very nearly allied genus Urochroma. On the other hand, of Agapornis, from which the so-called genus Poliopsitta can scarcely be separated, five if not six species are known, all belonging to the Ethiopian Region, and all but one, A. cana (which is indigenous to Madagascar, ...